


Monsters, Inc.

by pinkbagels



Category: Hannibal (TV), Mr. Robot (TV)
Genre: Gen, Just a mind doodle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-29
Updated: 2016-09-29
Packaged: 2018-08-18 14:18:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8164840
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinkbagels/pseuds/pinkbagels
Summary: Elliot Alderson has a session with Dr. Hannibal Lecter.





	

 

  
Hello, Friend.

You may have noticed I'm sitting in a psychiatrist's office, and not the one belonging to Dr. Gordon. She's on vacation in the Bahamas with a guy she met on Craigslist, and while he's not as much of a creep as the last one, he's got social anxiety issues and is somewhere on the autism spectrum, though she doesn't know that yet. He wrote a computer program that's been pulling catch phrases from online dating sites and using them as benchmarks in conversation, an interesting bot but easy enough to crack once you know what to look for. Too many repeated phrases. Inappropriate wording. But Dr. Gordon is desperate, and the desperate don't look for details. They want to ride on hope. I hope she likes talking about shellfish, because that's the only reason he's going on vacation with her, he isn't a marine biologist like he said he was, but he's obsessed enough. He'll be sure to fill her in. Hours upon hours of long conversations about shrimp.

I kind of envy her, if you can believe that. Right now I'm stuck in an office that a professional colleague of hers has rented out for the month while he covers her patient appointments here in New York. Look at all this chrome and black leather, it's got that antiseptic feel, the kind of office that sits in a limbo of function, devoid of the personal. He sits across from me, overly trim and perfect in his Burberry suit that's too fashionable to withstand the classic test of time. He's polished, very well educated, gives off an air that he knows everything, and can quote Dante's Inferno on a dime. He has a soft accent, Lithuanian, and it's got that undercurrent of communist diplomacy so common to his generation--Keen to put me on even footing, while being just aloof enough to make sure I know he's far above me. He's bored with my bland answers, he's distracted by what he believes he sees, which is a troubled young man like oh so many troubled young men who wander through life with thoughtless delusions, doing drugs and never living up to their full potential. He wrote me off the second he saw me hunched in my hoodie, my backpack slung to my feet on the floor.

There's a lot that Dr. Hannibal Lecter knows. He's a genius by any stretch of the imagination. Surgery was boring, so he switched to psychiatry. He's a man of a myriad degrees. Art, history, medicine, music, mathematics. An expert on it all. There's sheets of music on the window ledge, a symphony he's been composing. A real renaissance man.

He doesn't know shit about computers.

You should know me by now. Nothing gets past my x-ray specs. Not even devils masquerading as doctors, for even they have bank accounts and Dr. Lecter's various pseudonyms did not get past my eagle eye. Estate records have revealed an awful lot of patients leaving him their fortunes upon their demise. And there's a lot of that around Dr. Lecter if you know how to look. There's a total lack of sexual perversion if you can believe it. I don't. Everyone gets their rocks off somehow. He consults with the FBI and with a GPS tracking hack of his cell phone I've been able to determine that he's often already at a crime scene before it's been officially reported. He uses his iPad to obsessively read the articles in a trash crime blog called Tattle Crime. He's gone so far as to be an anonymous troll in the comments under inflammatory articles about an FBI profiler named Will Graham. He appropriates ignorant netspeak, imperfectly applied but it gets its point across. He threatens to kill Freddie Lounds. I kind of hope he does, her writing style sucks. Fifty Shades of Grey meets cleaning product ads. You can feel your intelligence slipping just reading her shit.

Back to Will Graham. Everyone has that creepy sensual itch they need to scratch and Dr. Lecter is no exception. He's obsessed with the scruffy looking sweaty guy with glasses who looks likes he's about to fall over in every picture taken of him. The guy's in worse shape than me. As a profiler he's basically a hermit, so not much to see save his self destruct button that's he's had his thumb on for years. Whiskey, dogs, death, that's Will Graham. He spends his days and nights peering into the heads of monstrous killers and hasn't yet clued in that the one who keeps texting him forty times a day is the Chesapeake Ripper and he's head over heels in love. Will Graham would probably be quite upset to know that the killer he's been hunting has been sneaking onto his property and taking pictures of him with his cell phone while he sleeps. While he showers. While he jacks off alone in his living room. That last one was a video clip and yes, it was as lonely and sad as it sounds. The only thing sadder is that it's easy to imagine Dr. Lecter jacked himself off in his own lonely living room while he watched it. Twin miseries.

Like I said, everyone has an itch they need to scratch.

I'm not sure why Dr. Lecter has this obsession with a man who has a life that's even more pathetic than mine. Seriously, Will Graham lives alone in the woods and is going broke buying dog food and paying expensive veterinarian bills. Dog hoarding as a hobby. I get the pathos, but I don't need the simplistic love from our four legged friends like he does, if anything it's a nuisance. Will Graham isn't like me in that regard, he picks up strays, he tames the monsters he catches. He's got one on a leash now and he doesn't even know it.

I suppose we all have that habit of bending reality to fit what we want, and even a cold blooded devil like Dr. Hannibal Lecter isn't immune. We attract monsters, people like Will Graham and myself. I have one attached to the inside of my skull and I think he does, too. Dr. Lecter wants Will Graham's monster to join him in his sandbox. I could stop that from happening, but what's the point? You know as well I do that there are certain inevitabilities in life, laws of attraction that have more to do with physics than sense. Dr. Lecter's murders have a pattern, a form of algorithms that are easy to interpret when you know how to look. He's running a program within himself that has degenerated into malware. A constant loop seeking a result, but it can only find the endless question. The people he's killed have slighted him, or Will Graham, in some way. He's teaching fatal error lessons.

I'm not sure I want to stop him. I wonder if I can send his program onto Philip Price, CEO of Evil Corp. How can I fault a madman's compulsion to kill the rude when the leader of Evil Corp's arrogance has killed millions worldwide? Seems a fair tipping point, to me.

He'll be archived soon. It's inevitable, no matter how elegant the virus, it will be detected eventually. I found it. Will Graham will find it. The only person it will remain obscure to is Dr. Lecter himself.

Take a good look, friend. Monsters all around you, running on corrupted programming. They are chiselling away at what you understand of the world. They are superimposing their malignant code on your own.

"Mr. Alderson? Are you all right?"

I nod, I smile with that bland look of the heavily drugged. "Yeah. Sure. I'm okay. Just...Thinking."

His cell phone rings, some classical tune. He pretends to ignore it but I know he's itching to pick it up and check, he needs to know, is it Will Graham calling him? Does the master of his heart have another crisis only Dr. Hannibal Lecter can make worse?

"I'm sorry, Mr. Alderson, but I have to take this call."

"It's all right," I say, and I mean it, I forgive the bastard, really. Who am I to judge who changes the world one corpse at a time? I kind of feel sorry for him. His ways are old fashioned. Inefficient.

My way is so much cleaner, easier and far reaching. The changes Dr. Lecter makes are selfishly personal, directed at the tiny atom of his life.

I'm not that small. I'm going to change the world.

I hear an echo in the back of my head. _"Don't you remember when we became Gods?"_

I snatch up my backpack. I give him a nod as I leave. I hear him talking in hushed tones to the tired, depressed man who has captured him and held his monster hostage in his understanding. I make a note to never let that happen to me.

 

 

 


End file.
